October 2009 Archives

Rebirth Brass Band snare drummer Derrick Tabb is nominated for a CNN 2009 "Heroes" award. He deserves it. Vote him in here.

You'll feel heroic too.

Here's my testimony on his behalf:

I
remember in 2007, when Tabb and his brother, Glen David Andrews, were arrested
during a memorial procession in Tremé for a fellow musician who had passed
away. Outside the courthouse where the two had to appear, their attorney Carol
Kolinchak read out loud the charges against the two, which were illegible on
the carbon copies of citations they'd been handed: "parading without a permit,"
and "disturbing the peace by tumultuous manner." She'd entered not-guilty pleas
on all counts. Tabb pulled out a pen and noted the spelling of tumultuous; he
wanted to check the definition carefully, to understand how he could qualify
for such a description.

The city
dropped the charges a few months later with no further comment; that
development received far less attention than the initial arrests.

I'll
never forget Tabb outside that courthouse. He was angry about the arrest. But
instead of lashing out, he struck out against the poor conditions in local
schools and lack of both proper instruction and decent instruments when it came
to music education. In 2007, he was dreaming big, about a program he wanted to
call "The Roots of Music."

He wanted
to create an after-school program to augment the school district's gutted music
programs, and to help develop students into brass-band musicians. "Right now
you don't have the musicians in the neighborhood anymore because that
environment is totally gone," he said. "This city had five great band directors
in high schools when I came up."And
it was about more than just music. "Right now, it's easier for a kid to get a
gun than a trombone. We're trying to change that reality."

Can arts journalism -- can arts, can journalism--adapt to changing technologies, new media, and a multi-tasking, screen-oriented, thumb-typing audience without losing its way, killing its aesthetic and going broke?

Can very smart professionals get together and discuss this issue via YouTube, Twitter and a brand-new website?

Can 10 new initiatives find success with help from nonprofit seed funding?

For the answers to these and other questions--and to contribute to the conversation--tune in: